Amp Room vs Gjalla

Amp Room is Softube’s guitar and bass platform for building tones from modeled amplifiers, cabinets, pedals, microphones, and studio effects. Five suites cover ENGL Savage Mark II, Marshall, Vintage, Bass, and Metal, with different gear combinations in each. Officially licensed effects come from Tube-Tech, Empirical Labs, Trident, and other makers. Suite Mode presents selected gear sets, while Studio Mode allows further tone shaping. Suite listings include a custom impulse-response loader, eight IR Producer Packs, customizable signal chains, and cabinet captures with movable microphones. Suites can be expanded with other Amp Room Suites and Amp Room Ready products. The software runs as AU, VST, VST3, or AAX inside a compatible DAW on macOS or Windows; it is not standalone. Use requires Softube and iLok accounts plus internet access. Prices range from €99, paid once to €149, paid once, with a 20-day trial.

Gjalla is a free, open-source guitar amp simulator for black metal and other raw styles. Sognevo, a one-person project making dark-music audio plugins, provides it for Windows, macOS, and Linux as VST3, CLAP, and, on macOS, AU, plus a standalone application. The processing chain includes input trim, noise gate, pedal, preamp, tone stack, power section, presence, cabinet, frost, and output trim. Its pedal offers 90s distortion, HM-2-style chainsaw, and starved-transistor fuzz voicings. Three analytic cabinets are included; WAV or AIFF impulse responses up to two seconds can be loaded, or the cabinet can be disabled for an external loader. Six factory presets, meters, editable knob values, undo and redo, tooltips, and a resizable interface are provided. Host latency is reported as six samples, stated as 0.13 ms at 48 kHz. There is no packaged release yet, so users must build from source or follow GitHub releases. A build requires Git, CMake 3.22 or later, and a C++20 compiler. Gjalla is GPLv3-or-later and has no telemetry, network access, update checks, or accounts.